XII. A Map to the Future
The defeated former goddess carries you to the surface in a bubble, and then you relax and just take in the praise from your adoring toy boy.
Yeah, right. If only.
Things aren't so simple when Yanbu carries you to the surface. Your presence has been missed. You're actually surprised. But one of the men found your clothes lying by the pool, and started making assumptions.
You're there to explain to the deyha that there was a malicious, man-drowning spirit dwelling in the pool that snatched Amigere and you saved him - and dealt with the spirit. And that's why they certainly are going to give you back your baggage.
It is necessary to get a little terse with them.
Oh, there's fear there, Fear from the pretty boys and fear from the hulking beastwomen. Someone who'll dive into a pond where a man-killing spirit lives is someone you shouldn't mess with. Of course, as a dragon-child sorceress, they shouldn't have been messing with you beforehand, but sometimes fools need reminding.
There are medical supplies in your possessions once you get them back. You find a dry, dusty room where afternoon sunlight streams in through high slitted windows, and set down a blanket. A measure of poppy juice will take the edge off the pain, and then as it kicks in you get to treating your injuries. The burns and cuts, you clean and wrap. You're applying your diminishing supplies of bruise balm to your elbow, when your nose twitches at the scent of burning soap.
"Yes?" you ask the deyha leader Layan. Your nerves are humming. You remember when the two of you met. And there is the worry that she might have realised you hypnotised her leader.
She looks down at you, her orange eyes catching the light, her ugly flat face twisted in a sneer. "Well, look at you, sorceress," she says. Honestly, 'leers' is a better word. "Looks like you went and got yourself beat up."
"No thanks to you and your people," you lie. "The goddess got angry at how you were taking water from her pool. You should really be thanking me. She'd have taken away all your pretty boys if I hadn't been here."
Ah, there's a twitch. She doesn't like the idea. She might look like she fell out the ugly tree, hit an ugly rock, and then rolled down the ugly hill before landing in an ugly swamp - and smell like it too - but she doesn't like the idea of someone taking them.
"You keep your hands off them,
muriha," she growls. She also doesn't like the idea of you calling them pretty.
"Darling," you tell her, "I have the birdman I got in payment from your captain. I don't need so many men." It's a lie, but she doesn't need to know that. "Now, because I have that agreement with the captain and technically it lasts until you get me to Cahzor, but if that wasn't the case…" you snap your fingers, with a pop of green light, "well, I'd be expecting to be paid for saving you all."
Layan recoils away at the flash - a parlour trick, nothing more - and paces back and forth in front of you. "Why are you loyal to Mahmuna?" she demanded.
How you love this. This mound of muscle doesn't know how to address you. You; soft, beautiful, and mid-way through treating your wounds from the last fight. She wants your power.
"She paid me for this job." You pause, considering this beastwoman. "When this job ends, I won't be," you say, loading your voice with implications.
She leans back, and chuckles. "Oh. So that's how it is."
"Darling, if you can afford me, I'll take offers into consideration," you say. You have no reason to get involved in the struggles of beastwoman savages, but you do have reason to make her think you could be an ally.
She looks you up and down - and her eyes linger. Her voice softens. "If you need more time in bed to get better, you just have to ask me," she says.
"We don't need to linger," you say cooly. "I'm not some weakling. These wounds are battle scars. They'll heal."
You actually very much want to linger. But you can't - won't! - look weak in front of these savages. You don't like the way the deyha eye you up like you're meat. Better to have them scared of you than thinking about how much you might be worth to the right specialist buyer. There are way to chain even a dragon-child's will.
You watch her go - that muscular build, that towering height, and consider whether her soul might be useful to don. No, you decide. Not when you're hurt like this. You can't risk the struggle.
But you want away from the deyha and their brutal politics. And their stink.
As the sun sets you set out again, but things don't go as well as might have been hoped. As it turns out, there's been a landslide up ahead as the soft peak crumbles, and it's hard going for the steeds. The men have to help clear the way so their horses can cross, and progress slows to a crawl.
The day's heating up by the time you reach a dusty, tired town that huddles around sandstone caves. You were meant to have passed it in the night. It's not a one-horse town, because you don't think they could afford a horse. There's just scrawny goats and balding chicken, rooting around in the parched soil. They've built countless waist-high walls here, to try to break up the passage of the hot wind and stop their dirt blowing away.
Layan, for her part, is looking at the mounts with concern. "We take a longer rest here," she orders. Her giant hyena is panting, and one of the mules is limping. She glances at you. "Lucky for you, sorceress. Shame your magic couldn't move those rocks out of the way."
"Do not mock sorcerous power lightly, deyha," you tell her, wiping your brow. "A goddess made that mistake." You look at her through your veil. "Let us hope you are wiser."
In truth, you're exhausted. You need to sleep, to let your body mend. You're missing the boring sandship because it bounced around far less than a pony. Your wounds hurt.
There is, thankfully, a bar where you make certain purchases - and you can easily persuade one of the locals to go live with her daughter for a night in return for coins. The cave squat is quite inadequate for your usual tastes, but in your situation it will do. Barely. Another coin is enough to get the old, greying woman running your errands and preparing food for you.
You sit in the gloom on the rug on the sandy floor, and carefully clean yourself off with rags. In your hand mirror, you can see that your eye is as bad as you feared, though the swelling has gone down somewhat. It'll heal. The gash across your stomach is healing nicely, but your elbow is still swollen and sore. Not broken, but you'll need to keep it mobile or it might lock up on you.
Pouring yourself a cup of the sour, resinous wine, you shudder as it goes down. It's really awful, but several more cups get you feeling nicely numb.
Amigere stands at the door. "Are you feeling any better?" he asks softly.
"I'm just tired, darling," you say. You light up a cheroot, swirling smoke around inside your mouth. "Go off, have fun. I need to sleep."
He doesn't leave, though. "Meira," he says, using that false name. He's being awfully presumptuous by using your false personal name, but you're too tired to care. He edges closer, his hands going to your back as he starts to massage your shoulders. "Are you sure you don't need me?"
With a chuckle, you gesture at him with your cheroot. "Of course I need you," you say - and the face of poor darling Ferem Niko Koizumi flashes before your face. He would have been your second husband. You had really loved him; needed him. But he had wanted you to give up your chaos-granted power, and you couldn't do that. In the end, you'd wanted the ever-changing tang of the wyld and the many hands of your chaos-dwelling lovers more than him. And then he'd found out you'd been lying to him and… well, he had to go.
Amigere will face the same fate if he pokes his nose too deep into your affairs. In both senses of the word. If you could give up consorting with the forces of chaos, you wouldn't be in your current situation - and Koizumi would have died for nothing.
And clearly his death mattered.
"I need you," you repeat, "but while the mind is willing, the flesh is weak. Let me heal, darling." You lean back against his thighs. "You still owe me."
"Well, you saved my life," he says. "Of course I do." His hands reach around to cup your breasts. "You know," he whispers in your ear, "there are certain leads I haven't followed yet for ancient mysteries you might be interested in. If you just fund me, I could seek them out for you."
That… wasn't the kind of owe-ing you were talking about. You suck in a pained breath as he accidentally puts pressure on one of your burns. "Let's not talk about these things now," you say, batting his hands way. "Go on; have some food, drink, relax from your traumatising ordeal. Once we get to Cahzor, I'll want you in tip-top condition."
He leaves, and you're left alone in this house. The old lady is running errands for you; you listen as Amigere's footsteps fade down the corridor outside. Time to see what...
"I don't trust him," Sei says from inside one of the niches in the stone wall.
"You don't trust him?"
"He's trying to lure you to him."
"Sei, Sei, Sei," you say. "Of course he is. I'm an exceptionally beautiful woman who just saved his life. What do you expect him to do?"
The cat harrumphs.
"Jealous, are we?" you enquire.
"I don't get jealous of your lovers," your familiar says, tail lashing behind him. "It's a high risk occupation. They tend to wind up dead when they find out more than they should. Or fed to me. Or you get bored with them and then there's the
drama of a breakup."
"I just think you're jealous," you say mildly.
He doesn't respond, clearly defeated by your wisdom. And that means you can finally see what the treasure you found was. You recover it from its hiding place, biting your lip, and turn it over in your hands.
"Well, well, well," Sei says, dropping down to pad over and curl up on your lap. "How did you get your hands on that without the goddess… sorry, former goddess noticing you had that?"
You only raise one eyebrow at him. "I'll tell you when you tell me how you got out of the sunken temple without getting wet."
"Mmm. Well, wash your hands, my lady. You don't know where it's been."
Firmly, you pick him up and drop him off your lap. He makes a squawking sound in being handled this way, which is nearly worth the spike of pain as the motion jars your elbow.
Once again, you return to staring at the thing you found. A white jadescroll - a wonder of the ancients, marked with the seal of the Shogunate. It may hold secrets from that fallen power, which ended over seven hundred years ago in plague and invasion by the princes of chaos. Or it might have been overwritten more recently by someone from this modern age, in which case it could hold anything. Sorcerous lore, blackmail material - there are so many uses for a jadescroll, which can hold thousands of pages.
"Well, are you going to open it, or are you just going to put it back where you found it?" Sei inquires.
"Shut up," you mutter. "I'm trying to work out how to activate it."
It takes some examination, but you figure it out, There's a chime from the jadescroll, and in a concertina movement it extends, until it's nearly the length of your forearm. Ah! You've seen one of these before in the great history-rooms of the Cherak Council. You stand it on end, wedging it into a crack in the floor.
Nothing happens until you take it out again and put it in the other way. And that's when the top expands like a blossoming flower, revealing a crystal under the jade. It lights up, flickering, and a wavering High Realm glyph appears. It's heavily corrupted and sometimes cuts out entirely. Tilting your head, you realise it's on it's side.
"Open," you read.
The glyph expands, breaking apart into more lights. It takes form as a sphere of blue-white light that floats over the tip of the jadescroll. You don't realise what it is until you pull yourself upright.
"It's a map," you breathe.
"Well observed, my lady," Sei says, voice thick with sarcasm.
Much of the text is corrupted, but the map is mostly intact. There's a floating, wavering city in pale blue, sprawling over what you think is a mountain valley by its size. Icons in various colours float, marking out various places. The architecture looks old, but there's no date you can see.
Stretching out, you stick your fingers into the hard air and rotate the map, peering down the valley. What are all these sites? What do they mean? Oh, that useless goddess, failing to take proper care of this treasure!
You stroke the dam at the top of the valley, a sizable mountain lake behind it. You're not sure where in Creation this is, but there are only so many dams built by the ancients. Perhaps this might even be Cazhor - after all, you're only a couple of days away from that city and your destination is Cazhor-upon-Dam.
Reaching out, you tap one of the icons - one in the valley wall. A floating red box appears, but the text in it is so corrupted you can't read it. There's the hovering glyph for 'Documents', but when you touch it, the map cuts out and only reappears when you withdraw your hand.
"Okay," you whisper to yourself. "Yes. I can work with this. It doesn't matter how corrupted it is. It's a map. I don't know what exactly, but all these locations must be important." You bite your lip. "It doesn't matter if most of them have been plundered in the years since. One of them might have been missed. Even if they haven't, this is a jadescroll. I can use this. Yes. Yes."
Taking the jadescroll up in shaking hands, you return it to its compact form. Who knows how long it will remain operational? You need to make copies of the information in it. Can't let it fail before you make sure you're not losing anything.
You're being sensible, and trying very hard not to
dance out of sheer joy. This might be exactly what you're looking for to rebuild your fortune and power. For once, fortune smiles on you.
"Is something funny?" Sei asks, with a yawn. "You're grinning like a fool."
You stoop down to stroke your familiar. "I have come into some luck, darling," you tell him. "Quite some luck. And who knows! You might be getting some snacks soon!"
Your laughter echoes out of the room.
END OF ARC 1
And with that, we draw Arc 1 to a conclusion.
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